Woman at the Champs-Élysées by Night

A woman in extravagant clothes walks the Champs-Élysées after dark, alone, faintly smiling, in the glow of the street lamps. Paris in 1891 read that arrangement quickly. An expensively dressed woman out on a boulevard at night without company was understood to be working, and the appearance was part of the work. The Van Gogh Museum, which showed this canvas in its 2016 exhibition about prostitution in French art, points at just that, the way clothes and artificial light were used to raise her appeal.

Night scenes of the city occupied Anquetin repeatedly in these years, when lit streets and evening crowds had become a subject in their own right. He had known Van Gogh in Paris a few years earlier, which is what brings his work into this collection. The museum bought the painting in 2010 with support from the Rembrandt Association and a Dutch lottery fund.